SubJunk

There are a lot of different strains of ebola, the most common is Ebola Zaire, coming from a place called Zaire in Africa. It can be passed along in many ways depending which strain it is. The Mayinga strain, for example, is airborne. However it isn't as much of an epidemic as you would think, its own efficiency is in fact its own downfall. Ebola isn't very good at surviving outside of a host (5-15 minutes is the estimate in conditions such as those in Africa) so it's extremely lucky it's an African disease because in the cases when the Mayinga strain does get out, it usually kills the entire village quite quickly, which is of course a tragedy for them but there's such a distance between villages that it usually stops there. If it ever got into a densely populated area... I shudder to think what would happen. Some interesting things about Ebola... Essentially, it turns your whole body into liquid. Your eyes "melt", internal organs do too, until they become somewhat like a water-bomb with very thin casing. Often during autopsy, upon removal of an organ it will just collapse into liquid regardless of how careful they are about handling it. I believe it has about a 95% mortality rate, but may be wrong (correct me) Takes roughly a week to die, however sometimes 4 days and sometimes 2 weeks (which is when euthanasia would come in handy)

or you can get the best of both worlds (this is in reply to sayonara by the way) and redirect to an invisionfree forum from your domain name, after all it will save you bandwidth, or do what i did which is have the forum inside an iframe (click in my signature to see what i mean) By the way sayonara, will i go to hell for all this blatent advertising for my science forum on a science forum?

I'm wondering if anyone knows why sometimes when we fall asleep we have a sudden spasm that wakes us up. I know it's something to do with signals being sent between hemispheres of the brain, but I want a more in-depth explanation of this. Apparently I do it a lot, but don't remember because it happens when I've just fallen asleep and I don't wake myself up when I do it. It's also happened to me about 5-10 times in my life that I can personally remember, and it's usually associated with a falling feeling. I'm aware it's a very common thing, so I'm not asking for testimonials here just if anyone has any detailed information on what causes this, or even a link or two, it would be much appreciated

Spaceman, there's a difference between being skinny and having lean muscle. "Nature is full of mammals — deer, squirrels and pigs, for example — living in marginal, isolated environments that gradually dwarf when food isn’t plentiful and predators aren’t threatening." http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6346939/ there's a source

One thing though spaceman. "i get by on a bag of peanuts and a nice mackrel a day" That's nice for you, but I'm guessing you're fairly skinny, unless you've only been eating such a little amount of food recently. I'm also guessing you don't work in a very physical environment, not very sporty etc. You must remember that humans get life handed to them on a platter, however. We don't grow up in the wild or spend most of the day hunting for food. What I'm saying is that we don't physically exert ourselves (on a whole) as much as a wild animal would. It's common-sense, I know, and I'm not some idiot for saying it, I just know that sometimes it's good to keep simple things in mind before you go off on complicated tangents.

Spaceman, perhaps you could clarify for me exactly what it is about what I said that you disagree with. In detail please.

Even if we spent 50 years researching just one kind of GE/GM food, we still wouldn't know enough about how it can effect the environment. Evolution does not just happen by chance. It happens for reasons, reasons that are essential to the survival of the species it concerns, and these changes are very precise and very gradual. It's the way things have to work, because if we suddenly change one thing, even with all the research possible, it could get out and harm something we havn't planned for. In nature there are too many variables to possibly be able to ever calculate to the point where you could say "this modification won't have any harmful effects on anything". Please note, this is not coming from a religious view-point as I'm an atheist, it's coming from the fact that we've only even named a fraction of living things on the planet, so we can never possibly know if a genetic modification will effect the majority of life on the planet. I used to be pro GE, mostly just 'cause hippies and activists etc piss me off (not because of their intentions necessarily, but because of the ways they try to achieve their goals) until I did my research and a lot of thinking. One day it suddenly occurred to me just how literally impossible it would be for humans (at this stage or in the near future at least) to safely genetically modify anything and guarantee it's safe.

I was going to post, but post #64 took the words right out of my mouth. Good job.

spaceman, just calm down. Click here and read through the whole thing. Also, here's a quote from the december 2002 issue of Scientific American by William Leonard: "From a nutritional perspective, what is extraordinary about our large brain is how much energy it consumes--roughly 16 times as much as muscle tissue per unit weight... In fact, at rest brain metabolism accounts for a whopping 20 to 25 percent of an adult human's energy needs--far more than the 8 to 10 percent observed in nonhuman primates." Here's an interesting link too.

you're absolutely right, I didn't think about it that step further

If SAD stands for Seasonal Effective Disorder, shouldn't it be SED?

I agree with Ophiolite that "life as we know it" is the key phrase for all these arguments. What we're arguing are theories, and theories can be proved wrong, and very often are, at least partially. "Water is a necessary prerequisite for life and so in the event that no water exists on Titan then there will be NO life there." Just because everything we know points to this being true doesn't make it true.

that says something in itself doesn't it? don't you think something like that would at least be a little more famous, like the Dropa Stones for example?

These days, anything can be faked. Without full analysis, which costs money, it's not hard at all to get people to believe a hoax. I read both the articles and they're very interesting. I just wish someone would be willing to put a little time/effort/money into these things so that instead of always ending up with "x-files" we actually found things out.

I have no idea buddy, but thanks for the headache Good luck

It could be possible. Let's remember that flores man was confined mainly on one island and most likely suffered from malnutrition (the explanation accredited to their size) As we all know, larger brains mean a lot more food, and because of modern human's large EQ we need a lot of food for our size, but not just any food, we need varied food to maintain full brain activity. They probably didn't have very varied food at all. So who knows, if they had've lived in a better place in the world they might've been formidable enemies for Sapiens There are also arguments that Floresiensis may not even belong to the genus homo due to hip formation and other things. Many aren't sure quite what to label it.

firedragon52, you might find it interesting to read men are from mars, women are from venus. I'm currently reading it for the second time, it's great for those times when you just can't understand why a female (or a male if you're a female) is acting in a certain way. It doesn't contain information about the biological side of things, so not the cause of the differences, but it does go into detail about what the differences are and how they affect interactions between sexes.

i have no idea, and i've never thought about that before. tickling can really piss me off but it still tickles, and i still laugh even when i'm thinking about killing them. i wonder why? great topic! i hope someone has an answer that makes sense or is proven

the phpbb ads are everywhere, at least in the latest version they are. especially in the user CP area. and the whole thing stops working if you remove certain ones.

oh and Sayonara³, with invisionfree you don't need your own website, they host the forum on their site. i know you were talking about forum software and invisionfree isn't exactly that, but just thought i'd mention it.

i've found that the best is invisionfree. i've tried a few others, including phpbb. phpbb is good because you have all the files to upload to your server, but it's also full of ads for phpbb. invisionfree is still free, in reply to someone elses post. it's great to customise, you can pretty much do anything with it, and way easier too if you're not familiar with how forums work on the coding side. click on my forum link in my signature and you'll see how versatile invisionfree is, i've changed it so much it hardly even looks like invisionfree.

mate I'm sorry to say, but you'd lose that bet

that's what I thought you'd say, and it's what I'd say too if anyone but myself had posted that photo but unfortunately i don't have that luxury this time. That camera had a video function too dammit, why didn't he take a video... At the time, we weren't thinking about showing people later on. It was just "oh crap, she's talking man, take photo! ryan, get over here and take a photo of this ghost!" "what ghost? are you guys high... what the hell" followed by the photo being taken. My friend Mark was who spotted it first, he was sitting on a chair by the fire in a daze, thought the little girl was talking to him.

simply put, click here and download the program. It's free.

yeah you're right there, it's just as believable as ghosts However, when you see a ghost for yourself it tends to be more convincing than a photograph hehe. I'd be interested to see what you think of my photo. To see the story behind it, go to the paranormal section of my forum (link in my signature), but here's the photo in case you can't be bothered http://forum.newscienceonline.com/images/Ghost%20In%20Fire.jpg